Rossellini to host fashion special

NEW YORK Other people dress fit to kill. When I get dressed, I look fit to be killed.

I'm the kind of fashion fugitive who would buy clothes shrink-wrapped at the 7-Eleven if I could. My glad rags are depressed. As a clothes horse, I'm a nag.

For me and others likewise sartorially challenged, "Paris Fashion Collections" is sure to be an eye-opener. For everyone else, it will simply be eye-popping.

The one-hour special, which ABC airs Thursday at 8 p.m. on KAMC-TV Channel 28 (Cox Cable Channel 8), showcases 25 of the world's top fashion designers (names like John Galliano for Christian Dior, Alexander McQueen for Givenchy, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Christian Lacroix) along with their 1999 lines, which were unveiled in Paris last week.

Still being edited, the program was unavailable for review. But a six-minute clip reel caught my eye tout de suite.

Here's a young woman wrapped in a white sheath with a huge Davy Crockett cap on her head. Here's a jumpsuit-clad model whose billowing train is a pink-and-orange parachute.

And the program goes behind the scenes. For example, there's a peek inside the House of Chanel with Karl Lagerfeld, who demonstrates how a couture design starts as a concept and culminates in a fabulous gown.

Host for a second year is Isabella Rossellini, who as an internationally famous supermodel and acclaimed actress as well as author, daughter of Ingrid Bergman and director Roberto Rossellini, and former spokeswoman for Lancome cosmetics knows a little something about glamour and style.

"But why does fashion matter?" I ask her.

"It matters for the same reason that film matters or music matters," she says brightly. "It isn't necessary, you don't need it. But it's fun."

And, on second thought: "Fun, we need!"

On the special, Rossellini will have fun wearing Chanel and Valentino, but for this recent interview she looks lovely in everyday finery: slacks and blouse. Her hair is shorn impishly short and she wears no makeup. Meanwhile, I am wearing scuffed Rockports and a $3 street-fair tie. It occurs to me I should go on "Sally" for a makeover.

"Sometimes fashion seems a little frivolous," I venture.

Rossellini smiles an incandescent smile.

"Fashion IS frivolity as music is melody or dance is rhythm! It really is the industry of playfulness."

"But what exactly IS haute couture?" I ask, pleased at having said it right.

"It's very confusing," she replied. "There's always been a misconception that these are clothes you have to wear." She shook her head.

"The haute couture is very experimental fashion. A lab of ideas. It's like (George) Lucas opening a door and saying, 'This is the new special effect that I'm working (on) for the film that I might be doing five or six years from now.'

"This is what haute couture is: a glimpse of what might be the future. Some of the ideas, we can never use them. But some of the things will trickle down to Levi jeans and the Gap."

But the more pressing goal of haute couture is to generate buzz among the couture cognoscenti.

"You have to be excessive so that you can make the point," Rossellini explains. "The daringness is important, because if it wasn't daring, we would still be busy wearing corsets. That's why I'm grateful to it!" And she bursts out laughing.

Rossellini has just finished shooting "Don Quixote," which will air on cable's TNT next season. She is about to appear in a new performance piece by Robert Wilson at Lincoln Center. And later this year she will launch her own cosmetic line, Isabella Rossellini's Manifesto.

Her own manifesto, after 47 years of classy singularity: Be yourself.

"You are successful if you are unique," declares the woman with the chipped front tooth she refused to fix when she began modeling. "If you bow down, if you become common, then they don't want you.

"There's always this pressure to level out," she allows. "But what they really want" and by "they" she means the audience, whatever the show "is people's specificity ... what you can give as an individual."